eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

September 2017

09/24/2017

“This issue on which the whole future of U.S. trade (and perhaps investment) policy may rest is how we decide, as a nation, to deal with the real dislocations to workers and firms caused by import competition. There are only two choices: to limit the imports themselves, or to help the dislocated workers and firms adjust to the new competition.” —C. Fred Bergsten, “The International Economy and American Business,” May 1973.

This is one of those books that everyone should read. Because they probably won’t, it is a book that every American teacher should read. Because they won’t, I am writing a brief review.

Edward Alden (the author) graduated from high school a year before I did. For those of you (and there are not many of you reading my blog) who were not around then, that was just when Ronald Reagan was coming to power in America and things began shifting in favor of the business-owning and investor class. It was also when it began to make more and more sense for American businesses to take advantage of trade liberalization to move their manufacturing plants to “better pastures” overseas. Alden explains why this boon to owners was not a boon to workers. “Such mobility,” he says of the ability that companies acquired to move to the states where the lowest wages were,

“tended to level wages within the United States as well since industry was just as mobile as labor—though, very importantly, not more so. While people could move to take advantage of higher wages, companies could also move to take advantage of lower labor costs.”

“By the time I went off to college in the fall of 1979, …. the conditions that had produced this self-sufficiency had largely disappeared. In the decade from 1970 to 1980, international trade as a share of the US economy had nearly doubled to more than 20 percent.”

This means that workers were losing their ability to simply move to the new state where the jobs had moved to. And because the new workers were not Americans, they could not put any political pressure on companies to improve wages or benefits. An underpaid and exploited American worker can vote in an American election. A similar person in Jamaica cannot.

“. . . For those who earned their livings making steel or stitching clothing or assembling TV sets, the nature of competition had changed profoundly. If one domestic car company gained market share at the expense of another, it had little impact on those who made cars; the employees let go by one company would likely be hired by another. But if the competitor was in another country, the impact was not so benign. Given the tight immigration restrictions in place in most countries, not to mention generally insurmountable cultural and linguistic barriers, laid-off auto workers could not simply pick up and move to another country where carmakers were hiring.”

No one explained these things to me in any of my courses in high school or college. But the implications for me could have been more profound (had I been inclined to make my living in manufacturing or in serving those who did make their money in that sector). “The ease with which companies can move across international borders has given them enormous leverage over their workforces,” Alden explains,

“Capital is far freer to move in search of investment opportunities, but labor cannot follow. That has given business far more power than it had enjoyed in the more self-sufficient economy of a generation ago.”

And thus, he concludes, “America’s leading companies are thriving, but the prosperity they are producing is not being shared broadly among U.S. citizens.”

The title of the book, Failure to Adjust does not implicitly identify who failed to adjust but the gist of the book suggests that it was everyone. Companies did not adjust by sponsoring more programs to retrain workers. The government did not adjust by upgrading the education system to better meet the competitive challenges. Tax codes did not adjust to sufficiently obtain the rising profits made by companies overseas. Institutions of secondary and higher education did not adjust to make training affordable. And, ultimately, the workforce itself did not adjust by heading down to the local library of community college. Indeed, many of these workers simply took their lower wages and expressed their anger by voting for politicians who promised to do something to bring their old jobs back.

“Far too many Americans are simply unprepared for the competition they are now in,” Alden writes,

“They are like overmatched boxers who keep getting knocked down, only to be told by their corner that they just have to get back in the ring and keep taking the punches in the hope that eventually they will become better fighters. It would make more sense to pull them out of the ring for a year of training and conditioning before sending them back again.”

For the worker who has the same skill as some overseas worker willing to work for half the wages of an American, the prospects have been bleak. “Companies have enormous leverage to demand government subsidies, tax cuts, or a compliant, low wage workforce as a condition for investment,” Alden explains. And thus, not only are the take-home wages lower, the wages must be taxed at a higher percentage to cover the loss of the corporate taxes that are now insulated from local taxation policies by the fact that such taxes can only be levied if the company brings the money back into the United states to spend.

Alden has more bad news. His chapter on trade agreements highlights why it is that the promise of global trade has not worked to the benefit of American workers. American politicians have often used trade deals for diplomatic purposes, handing over one commercial trade advantage after another to allies and potential allies as payment for their loyalty in our geopolitical games. Deals that make allies happy at the cost of American workers have been the order of the day for decades. Strategic goals continued to outweigh economic ones for US policymakers and this perception of political callousness on the part of those making those deals was at the heart of Donald Trump’s surprising electoral victory in 2016.

Though politicians continued to genuflect to the working classes to get their votes, it appears that what they were doing involved the selling of a certain amount of snake oil. What they were doing was passing trade regulations without creating the mechanisms for enforcing them. Just as they were passing immigration quotas that they never intended to actually enforce, they made trade deals that ultimately never had any teeth in them. So long as investors and corporate donors did not really want them enforced, it seemed to work. “We need a commitment to better results, not just better rules,” Alden insists.

“US corporate profits hit record levels in 2013 and 2014, and as a share of national income, corporate profits were the highest recorded since I 929. A steadily larger share of those profits is now earned overseas. Nearly half the revenue for companies on the S&P 500 now comes from outside the United States, and some 60 percent of their cash is held outside the United States.”

Cash made overseas is cash not taxed by the U.S. or its individual States. Take Apple for example, Alden writes,

“While Apple paid more than 30 percent in federal tax on its US profits that year, the tax rate on its foreign earnings was just 2.5 percent. The difference matters enormously because Apple earns the majority of its revenue outside the United States –“

What does this mean? It means that the owners of companies like Apple get to enjoy the benefits of living in an American society that they are not being taxed proportionately to pay for. Whether I entirely agree with Bernie Sanders’ solutions to this reality is immaterial. He is correct to insist that it is a moral as well as political problem. Is it enough for us that Americans who have invested in Apple pay 15% of their earnings in taxes when Apple itself pays executives with dividends instead of salaries so that they can pay significantly less in U.S. taxes than they might otherwise?

“In the past half century, American corporations have become increasingly adept at using profit shifting to low-tax or tax-haven countries to drive their tax bills lower and lower. Even as corporate profits have hit record levels, corporate taxes as a share of total federal tax payments have fallen to their lowest levels since the United States began taxing corporate income a century ago. This falling corporate share has contributed to the federal budget deficit, leaving less money for education, research, infrastructure, and other public investments that could help the United States in responding to international economic competition.”

“In recent years, several high-profile companies have undertaken what are known as ‘inversions,’ in which a US-headquartered company merges with a foreign partner and then relocates the headquarters outside the United States to take advantage of lower corporate tax rates in countries like Ireland or even Canada. The companies include drug giant Pfizer, auto parts and HVAC maker Johnson Controls, and fast-food giant Burger King.”

“With further clever tax planning of the sort that Apple, Starbucks, and other companies employ, the bulk of those profits can be ‘earned’ in low-tax jurisdictions like Ireland or no-tax jurisdictions like Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. In Apple’s case, according to the Senate investigation, 64 percent of the company’s global pretax income (i.e., income earned outside the United States) was recorded in Ireland, even though only 4 percent of Apple’s employees and 1 percent of its customers are in Ireland.”

Obviously, some companies cannot simply move elsewhere. If they mine things out of the ground or sell things to consumers who are not going to drive to China to buy them, they must stay where they are and pay their corporate taxes. And thus, “The highest tax rates are paid by relatively immobile companies …” Thus, Ironically, Walmart pays way more U.S. taxes than Apple.

In Failure to Adjust, Edward Alden argues that the solution is not to put obstacles in the way of U.S. companies who wish to compete in international marketplaces. If one simply brought jobs back to American where these companies would have to pay double wages, they would lose the ability to compete in international markets. They would not sell the same number of iphones and solar panels around the globe. Because of the way international competition works, they would simply go out of business.

“If GM were not building those cars in China, some other competitor—Volkswagen, BMW, Toyota, Honda—would probably do so instead and capture most of the Chinese market growth.”

Alden’s argument is thus not for protectionism and tariffs or for forcing companies to relocate manufacturing plants back in the U.S. . His argument is that as a country, we have failed to recognize the nature of new realities and when we have recognized that reality, we have failed to educate people to adjust to it. We have failed to go into negotiations with a view to the interests of all citizens.

“The failure to help American workers adjust to the new scale and intensity of global competition,” he concludes, “is one of the bigger mistakes of US government economic policy in the last half century, one that has resulted in an enormous waste of human capacity and in eroding popular support for international trade and U.S. Engagement with the world.”

Question for Comment: The question that is left on the table for me is not, “should people re-invent themselves with the help of teachers who can help them meet these new challenges? That question to me is a slam dunk, “yes.” The difficult question is, “Who should pay for that training?” Should companies themselves pay for it? Should State governments (who generally are in control of education budgets) pay for it? Should the Federal government whose trade deals and tax policies are causing the problem, have to pay to retrain people whose lives are impacted? Or should the responsibility of educational costs rest on the shoulders of workers themselves?

09/23/2017

sat·ire ˈsa-tī(ə)r/noun the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.

In satire, Northrop Frye says, “irony is militant.” The satirist makes people laugh so that they do not feel the scalding pain they are likely to feel when you make them think. Those who are adept at satire atre often criticized by their “victims” for being smart enough to see something that is imperfect but not smart enough to come up with their own path to the perfection they expect. Still, in some societies where power differentials make the direct inflicting of criticism difficult, the satirist can hide behind his or her clown face and deliver many scalding attacks, claiming to be nothing but a joker and an entertainer.

The practitioner of satire can take a variety of approaches. They can be subtle and gentle or they can be abrasive and even cruel. The satire can be scornful and full of venom or it can be whimsical and full of goo-natured ribbing. There are probably as many different satirical moves as there are people who practice them. One can impersonate the person being criticized. One can take their points of view to some ridiculous logical conclusion. One can place one authoritarian statement with another contradictory one made by the same person. In satire, an authority can be caricatured and have his or her weaknesses exaggerated or they can be pilloried by comparison with someone who they share common traits with. Satire can use poetry or music or images or art.

In Tickling Giants, we follow the story of Bassem Yousef, an Egyptian doctor who gives up his practice to host a satirical television show following the style and form of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. The film follows Dr. Yousef through his decision to leavemedicine for television, his decision to use television as a political weapon, and his decision to surrender the field to the military-led government of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

When satire is done well, it speaks the truth without inflicting the pain that truth costs (immediately) but often the pain that it inflicts is from a distance. The administer of the pain and the receiver are not in the room at the same time. The receiver has no real ability to defend themselves if they are not “witty” by nature. And thus the recipient can be tempted to reach for other weapons at their disposal. This is exactly what happened to Bassem Yousef

Question for Comment: What are the advantages and disadvantages of providing multiple forums and platforms for satirical work?

The film, The Overnighters, is about the stresses placed upon a North Dakota community and a church within that community, when an oil boom comes to town. Imagine the population of your town doubling in the period of a year or two. Imagine that the migrants who move into town are an assortment of broken, struggling, single men with no prospects anywhere else and many of them come with criminal records that prohibit their getting jobs in the places from which they come.

“It’s easy to become a facade,” Pastor Reinke tells us at the beginning of the film, “maybe especially when you’re a pastor. But I know for me, the public persona, . . . and the private person, become something else. And the result is always pain.” Towards the end of the film, he comes back to this theme when he says,

“The private me distances itself from the public me. And I can believe the public me because sometimes it looks very good. But the private me has become something else.”

The public pastor becomes even more public when he decides to allow his work with the migrants to be filmed. Seeking to make the church available to homeless workers, Pastor Reinke must navigate the feelings of his parishioners, his family, the neighbors, the local paper, and the various men with their diverse needs themselves. He must also navigate his own emotions as he deals with the callousness of friends, the dishonesty of some of the men, the fears of the community, and the demands of his faith. Before the film is over, we also learn of even deeper realities that were serving as an underlying cause of this pastor’s empathy for the outsider. Perhaps he knew that he would soon be one. Perhaps his decision to open up his church so completely in spite of the risks doing to presented to his job as a minister there, were all a means to an end – to find a way to make a transition from life as a pastor altogether.

This is a movie that enters deeply into personal space. I confess, maybe too deeply for a Yankee like myself. But it is a reminder that each of our lives can be a riveting story.

Question for Comment: Do you think someone could make a documentary worth watching out of your life?

09/10/2017

According to the author, Simon Parkin, The following excerpt is taken from an article titled ‘Chess-playing excitement,’ published in the July 2, 1859, issue of Scientific American.

“Those who are engaged in mental pursuits should avoid a chessboard as they would an adder’s nest, because chess misdirects and exhausts their intellectual energies ... It is a game which no man who depends on his trade, business or profession can afford to waste time in practicing; it is an amusement—and a very unprofitable one—which the independently wealthy alone can afford time to lose in its pursuit. As there can be no great proficiency in this intricate game without long-continued practice, which demands a great deal of time, no young man who designs to be useful in the world can prosecute it without danger to his best interests.”

What would the author of this article think about the place that video games play in the lives of millions of people today? Parkin’s book is an attempt to better understand what it is that people find so addictively mesmerizing about computer gaming. It is not his intent to get people to quit gaming (he obviously is a practitioner and a fan). He just wants to understand how gaming functions on an emotional and instinctual level. Basically, he concludes that games become more important to us the more that they wind up meeting certain basic unmet needs. And the more important the need and the more lacking we are in an answer to that need, the more addictive a game can become. “This is their great benefit,” of computer gaming, Parkin writes: “but it's also their great peril. For some people, devotion to improving at a video game begins to mimic the unbreakable grip of substance addiction, if not the chemical dependence.”

Here are some of those human needs that computer games can be made to address, for good or bad.

One:Games can provide a person with a feeling of success in a life otherwise full of disappointment.

One of our basic human needs involves a desire for achievement. In a world where your odds of achieving success are somewhere between “not likely” and “not possible,” games are there for you. Parkins uses the following illustration of a serious World of Warcraft player.

“Boyle’s impoverished circumstances fueled his interest in the game. He had no job, a ‘horrible girlfriend,’ and a ‘slum of an apartment’ with no heating or windows. ‘I would skip showers because the place was so horrendously cold,’ he recalls. ‘I’d rather deal with the discomfort of being filthy. But in the game I was in the top five hundred players worldwide. I was a success. So there was more of a motivation to better my avatar and go for numbers in rankings than there was to further my education.”

“Video games allow the people usually picked last to become top athletes;” Parkins adds later,

“Video games allow the bullied child a power fantasy in which he or she can overcome the attackers and triumph; video games offer clear routes to victory to people who struggle to achieve on the other side of the screen.”

Two: Games can provide a feeling that the world we exist in is somehow fair or at least predictable in its unfairness.

Consider how many of us deal with disappointment and injustice poisoning and then consider how a computer game can, antidote-like, function more like the world we *want* this world to be. “For a human who has experienced life's petty and major injustices,” Parkins explains,

“What better place is there to spend one's time than in a virtual world, where struggle always leads to success, where effort is repaid in kind, where there is justice and glory for any and all who want it.”

“This is, for many, the great appeal of all games: to experience a reality that runs on unflinching logic and justice, where the rules are never broken, where randomness can be contained and tamed.”

“Video games are normally based on fairer and more just systems than those in the real world (or, at very least, on systems that tend to favor the player). That's what makes them so palatable, such wonderful places to visit.”

The author notes also that “most video games do not force you to live with your mistakes.” Something there is that draws us to a place where forgiveness actually allows us to play a mistake ridden round of our lives over. Computer games do not mind.

Three: Games can provide us a place where we can explore in a world where it seems there is nowhere in the real world left that is unknown.

Human beings are wired to explore. You can see it in babies. As we age, we are told not to - that exploring is dangerous. And then we go to school where we learn that everything worth knowing is already known. Games give us real (yet unreal) new worlds to explore. “All of these places can be visited without the drag of realworld travel’ Parkins insists.

“The cumbersome luggage, the unreliable trains, the rude public, the sore feet. These vivid places have been compacted onto discs and hard drives, facilitating a kind of tourism and exploration that are danger free. Can virtual discovery match the thrill of real-world exploration? As with success, the imitation is powerful, compelling and, crucially, cheaper and more accessible.”

He illustrates by talking about this guy who is spending many many hours every week just traveling through the game setting of the game, Minecraft.

Four: Games provide people with a sense of belonging in a world where social connection is spare and fragile.

“The power of video games is to give people a place to belong,” we read. Parkins gives illustrations of how many gamers form groups around their gaming activity, both in character and without. Games can provide the glue to bind us into tribes that we still apparently need in this age of the atomized individual.

Five: Games [provide a place for anti-social and even vicious instincts to be expressed.

In his chapter on evil, the author makes the case that children who are raised in a violent world need violent play to help them understand and prepare (like wolf clubs practicing attacking and defending one another). “We instinctively understand that our games are violent because they reflect a violence within us as both individuals and collectives,” says Parkins, “Games offer a way to explore violence within safe and fictional borders, allowing us to confront our more primal instincts.”

Six: Games can provide a place to escape from pain, grief, and stress.

Sometimes, what humans need is emotional shelter from a storm. Psychologically, games can provide a cave in a hurricane for our minds. Parkins illustrates with a story about a man who’s child is dealing with cancer and to whom the numbing escape of a computer game becomes necessary for relief from constant fear.

“For Ferguson, bewildered with grief and confusion, Skyrim was a place he was able to visit in order to be anchored. It might seem strange that someone might choose to find their feet in a place that doesn't exist. But when reality has let you down with an event of colossal indifference and capriciousness, the reliable rules and outcomes of a video game become all the more inviting.”

“It was a real opportunity to disappear into another world.”

Seven: Games can provide a sense of mystery and amazement.

In a world where science explains everything and there are no miracles, games provide a place where amazing things can happen. “'The problem with God being dead is that nobody builds cathedrals any more,' Auriea Harvey said. 'And humans need cathedrals. Or, at very least, they need somewhere to go for refuge, reflection, sanctuary and rest.’”

“Video games have always been filled with secrets” we are informed by the author. There are hidden things to amaze everywhere. And not everyone finds them.

“Many video games, especially those with vast and complicated worlds that are filled with secrets and Easter eggs, satisfy the human desire to hunt for the truth, and offer the comforting notion that there is logic and design behind these simulated worlds, the same hope that has inspired humans throughout history to search for God.”

Eight: Games give us a chance to survive or to pretend that we will survive.

“All the best video games are about survival,” Death By Video Games tells us. And survival is the primary directive that the human brain is focused on. “This language, both written and visual, infuses video games with primal urgency that we instinctively respond to.”

“We talk of 'saving' our progress in a game, making a permanent record of what we've done within their reality. Video games are perhaps a kind of immortality project, a way to save the memory of our progress in life, a way to find glory through victory in competition and, ultimately, to somehow endure.”

Parkins describes a game called Desert Buss that requires the player to drive a bus for hours on end. “Players earn a single point for each eight-hour trip completed between the two cities [Las Vegas to Tuscon], making a Desert Bus high score perhaps the most costly in the medium.” The game is designed such that the bus veers off the road if you are not constantly driving it. “Almost all video games have this survival element coded within their rules,” Parkins writes,

“and ‘losing’ a game is usually closely linked to some idea of death. Video-game designers routinely employ the metaphor of life and death ¡n their game’s terminology: characters have ‘lives’ (when they are depleted, you are ‘over’; do well in the game and you often earn extra lives, second chances that prolong your journey and provide a buffer from death), or ‘health’, usually represented by hearts.”

“In many games you replenish this health with food (Gauntlet), medicine (Halo: Combat Evolved) or bandages (Dead Rising). The language of survival is used across the medium with such regularity that we no longer notice its origins. Some games turn the character into a ghost when they ‘die’ Spelunky) while others, such as Demon’s Souls, make you return to the site of your most recent ‘death’ in order to collect the items you dropped there. Other video-game characters, such as Worms, mark the spot of their passing with a gravestone. In Cannon Fodder, for each of your soldiers that perish during a mission a new grave is added to a virtual hillside, a mark of their death (as well as an indication of the cumulative human cost of your various sorties.”

All of these human drives can make a person feel the gravitational pull of games that are designed to capitalize on human them.

Question for Comment: If Parkins is correct, and if we do indeed have needs met via our games (or our novels or films or sports), is anything lost to us or to society if game designers get even better at their art?

09/09/2017

Two movies, produced within one year of each other that deal with the same subject (the Armenian genocide) in the context of similar plot-lines (the love triangle with an American involved) but with different slants. In, The Promise, the film's funding comes from an Armenian backer apparently and in The Ottoman Lieutenant, the funding proceeds from a Turkish source. What they share in common is a decision to include Americans in the plot-line (via the American missionaries in the Ottoman Empire that I wrote my Masters thesis on) and on a willingness to present at least one Turkish lead in a positive light. Where they differ is in how much they revile or justify all other Turkish participants in the plot-line.

In The Ottoman Lieutenant, the script writers have done a rather deft job at setting what happened to the Armenians during WWI in a context that neither glorifies it nor condemns it unilaterally. In both movies, Armenian women and children are driven from their homes and massacred but there is something of a difference in how these events are covered. An American, for example, will not see Mai Lai as a result of American military policy in Vietnam or Abu Graihb as representative of American policy in Iraq. In a similar way, The Ottoman Lieutenant highlights a noble (and handsome) Turkish soldier who fights for his family honor and country; seeks to protect the homeland he loves from Russian savagery and depredations; and bravely defends the innocent no matter who they are.

In The Ottoman Lieutenant, the script writer has taken pains to highlight the fact that the Turks were not alone in the way that they treated minorities at times. For example, the main character, Lillie, is a nurse and when the movie begins, we see her trying to save a black man's life in a hospital in Philadelphia (The City of Brotherly Love) that condemns her for allowing that a white hospital is an appropriate place for a black patient about to die from gunshot wounds. All the scene lacks is a reference to Jesus telling the Pharisees to "take the logs out of their own eyes before trying to tack specks out of others." The implication is subtle but powerful. Can Americans condemn Turks for having an identity ethics problem when they themselves at the time were legally asserting that "black lives didn't matter"?

Secondly, in The Ottoman Lieutenant, it is made clear that Armenians were a potential threat to the Ottoman State, giving cover to the Russian government for an invasion of the Turkish homeland. In The Ottoman Lieutenant, we are also given a scene where the "neutral" American missionaries are seen helping Armenians to stash weapons in their compound chapel. An Armenian Christian character who earlier tried to hijack an American truck full of medical supplies destined for the hospital is seen selling the truck of supplies back to the hospital with full knowledge that in doing so, there is an implicit financial support being given to what the film refers to as "Armenian rebels." Indeed, in the Ottoman Lieutenant, Lillie is saved from the ravages of the Armenian brigands by her noble Turkish escort. By including these scenes, The Ottoman Lieutenant makes the case that the Armenians were functioning like a disloyal Trojan horse within the empire, threatening it from within by allying themselves with international powers hostile to the survival of the Ottoman Empire.

The story that The Promise tells is a good deal harsher towards the Turkish government and Turks as a whole, but it does allow that there were some Turks, or at least one, who stood up and tried to protect their Armenian or American friends. In The Promise, the acts of violence towards Armenian villages and Armenian women and children are not sporadic, random, and committed by uncontrolled mobs. They are targeted, planned, and committed by the State. The film takes pains to enact each and every one of the different depredations that were committed; executions, pogroms, forced marches, humiliations, labor camps, etc. It is a film, loosely connected by a love story that intends to document Armenian traumatic memory. i.e. "And then they did this to us ... and then they did this to us ... and then they did this ..."

In both movies, the enemy is often defined by the worst person that the enemy allows to be part of its group. One's own group is to be defined by the best person one's own group ever produced. In the Turkish version, a "bad Armenian" defines an Armenian and a noble Turk defines a Turk. In the Armenian version, a bad Turk defines what it means to be Turkish and a noble Armenian defines what it is to be Armenian. In The Ottoman Lieutenant, the central female lead (an American nurse) falls in love with the noble Turk even though an American doctor is obviously interested in her. In The Promise the central female lead is an Armenian artist who grew up in Paris and she falls in love with an Armenian doctor even though an American journalist is obviously interested in her.

Just as a side note, The Promise was funded to the tune of 90 million dollars by the multi-billionare Kirk Kerkorian (a Los Vegas real estate businessman and later owner of MGM studios). Kerkorian, it should be noted, was of Armenian Desent.

The Ottoman Lieutenant was funded by some murkey Turkish production company and has been labelled by Armenians, understandably, as "propaganda." The Promise films all the scenes from the Ottoman Empire in Spain. The Ottoman Lieutenant is filmed in Turkey. That should probably tell you something. The Armenian Weekly urges Armenians and Americans not to watch The Ottoman Lieutenant. There seems to be a Turkish led campaign to dissuade people from watching The Promise as well. Ratings from The Promise suggest that those who vote either give it a ten or a one with almost nothing in between, suggesting that ideological partisanship is at the bottom of recorded public opinion. People are not asking "Is it a good movie" so much as "Is it a movie made by our side?"

Question for Comment: It seems to be a human tendency to always look for the worst in any enemy and the best in oneself and to compare the two as if were helpful to reduce an argument to terms one knows will be favorable to themselves.

09/03/2017

John Banville’s novel, The Sea is about memory. I wish I could say that it was a novel I will never forget. I can’t say that it was poorly written or that its theme was not interesting. For some reason, it just won no prizes with me. And yet, I should like to think about what there is in it to make one think. Max, the main character is an elderly gentleman who has recently lost his wife and just returned to the scene of a childhood memory that still haunts him. One year after his wife has died, he decides to finally go back and process the two (perhaps three) great losses of his life at the same time, his life’s first loves and his last. In doing so, he must come to terms with just exactly what memory is for it would be impossible to understand grieving without understanding memory. Maybe that is Banville’s key insight.

“I am amazed at how little has changed in the more than fifty years that have gone by since I was last here,” Max tells us of the seaside town where he spent his summers as a boy.

“Amazed, and disappointed, I would go so far as to say appalled, for reasons that are obscure to me, since why should I desire change, I who have come back to live amidst the rubble of the past?”

This narrative of memory as rubble is something that he will often return to. What we remember of life long past and of life recent is always deconstructed, fragmentary, reconstructed, elusive, deceptive, sometimes achingly detailed, sometimes frustratingly imprecise, riddled with gaps, or downright inaccurate. Max’s observations about his memory are thus contradictory. At times, things that happened five decades earlier are clearer than things happening yesterday. At times, things that are clear in his memory are found to be invented somewhere along the way. What we “remember” – what has power to influence us emotionally as we remember it, is a different thing than the past itself. “The past beats inside me like a second heart,” Max says. As if to say “It has a life of its own.”

Banville reflects on memory through Max’s experience, noting that sometimes what we remember is simply more real than what we are remembering. His life one summer as a young adolescent boy was deeply impacted by a family by the name of Grace (Carlo, Constance, Myles, Cloe, and the teenager the Graces hired to watch their children, Rose). Max spends a good deal of the novel thinking back to those poignant moments of his summer and his life and we are reminded that the things that we remember best are sometimes still remembered poorly.

“Later that day, the day the Graces came, or the following one, or the one following that, I saw the black car again, recognized it at once as it went bounding over the little humpbacked bridge that spanned the railway line. It is still there, that bridge, just beyond the station. Yes, things endure, while the living lapse.”

One of Max’s pivotal moments takes place in the sand by the sea one day and he remembers it in detail.

“Chloe sulks. Myles goes back to delving violently in the sand with his stick. Their father folds his newspaper and squints at the sky. Rose is examining a loose button on her shirt. The little waves rise and plash, the ginger dog barks. And my life is changed forever. But then, at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly changed until the final, most momentous change of all?”

There are “moments when the past has a force so strong it seems one might be annihilated by it” we are told. And yet, memory also plays games. It will insulate us from some things, maneuver us away from emotional danger, hypnotize us, and sometimes add details. Memory is rather like … like the sea in that way. We are not always in control of it. Max must face the fact that memories are real things and not real things. Connie Grace, he tells us was “at once a wraith of my imagination and a woman of unavoidable flesh and blood.” He notes that these people from his past who are no longer alive, still live in his memory as if they did. “She is in my memory her own avatar,” he says of Mrs. Grace.

“Which is more real, the woman reclining on the grassy bank of my recollections, or the strew of dust and dried marrow that is all the earth any longer retains of her? No doubt for others elsewhere she persists, a moving figure in the waxworks of memory. But their version will be different from mine, and from each other’s. Thus in the minds of the many does the one ramify and disperse. It does not last. it cannot, it is not immortality. We carry the dead with us only until we die too.”

And this too is true of his deceased wife.

Max’s daughter tells him that he lives in the past, and he does.

Sometimes memory intrudes on present experience and sometimes present experience intrudes on memory. “It has all begun to run together, past and possible future and impossible present” Max explains. Sometimes, he instructs his memory to supply details and it refuses. Sometimes he orders his memory to forget - and it rebels.

“Her hands. Her eyes. Her bitten fingernails. All this I remember, intensely remember, yet it is all disparate, I cannot assemble it into a unity.”

“The model of the house in my head, try as it would to accommodate itself to the original, kept coming up against a stubborn resistance. Everything was slightly out of scale …”

“But wait. This is wrong. This cannot be the day of the kiss.”

“Remarkable the clarity with which I can see us there. …”

“I was thinking of Anna [Max’s wife]. I make myself think of her, I do it as an exercise. She is lodged in me like a knife and yet I am beginning to forget her. Already the image of her that I hold in my head is fraying, bits of pigments, flakes of gold leaf, are chipping off. Will the entire canvas be empty one day?”

“Memory dislikes motion,” Max insists. It captures still frames when a moving picture might have given us more. “The real past matters less than we pretend,” he eventually surrenders. What actually happened is somehow less vital and vigorous than how we remember things happening. He has a hard time reconciling. “Once out of my presence, she should by right become pure figment,” he practically sobs. But she doesn’t.

And ironically, the one person who is still alive from that summer long ago is the one who is still alive. The character from his childhood story who still lives in this seaside town is the only one that his memory seems not to molest with alteration.

“Of the three figures in that summer’s salt-beached triptych it is she, oddly, who is most sharply delineated on the wall of my memory. I think the reason for this is that the first two figures in the scene, I mean Chloe and her mother, are all my own work while Rose is by another, unknown, hand. I keep going up close to them, the two Graces, now mother now daughter, applying a dab of colour here, scumbling a detail there, and the result of all this close work is that my focus on them is blurred rather than sharpened, even when I stand back to survey my handiwork. But Rose, Rose is a completed portrait, Rose is done.”

Ultimately, Max’s return to the past almost kills him in the end. He finds himself overwhelmed by memories of what happened the summer he first fell in love and the summer he was informed by Dr. Todd that his wife was going to die.

“To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have ever truly ever wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky’s indifferent gaze and the air’s harsh damagings. That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet.”

Ironically though, our memories, like the world we live in, can be either a safe place to retreat from the present, or a dangerous and dark forest that makes a person, in the words of Tennessee Williams, want to “blow their lights out.” [reference to the last lines of The Glass Menagerie]

Question for Comment: When you think of your life’s great first loves and last loves, does memory serve you, or smack you around a bit?

09/02/2017

How did I miss Chateaubriand when I was assembling sources for my course on Romanticism? He seems to be right up there with Rousseau and Goethe in his influence or intended influence. Like Goethe, he later was somewhat ashamed of his influence but nevertheless, one does not always get to unlight the forest fires that they set ablaze. Written in 1801 and 1802, the short novels Rene’ and Atala participated in Romanticism’s reaction to Enlightenment values by making the irrational and emotional heroic. “One inhabits, with a full heart, an empty world,” Chateaubriand wrote, coining that James Dean like character who suffers for being a great soul, outcast from normal life in a mediocre world.

The young man in his story, Rene, revolts against a world where the only great task a young man is offered is the task of stuffing their fiery ambitious soul into a puny life. Rene must deal with a world that does not ask enough of its young. Rene then has no choice but to flee civilization for the wilds of the American west where he winds up living with Indians. “Absolute solitude, the vision of nature, soon plunged me into a state well-nigh impossible to describe,” Rene tells us in the story.

“Without parents, without friends, alone on earth, so to speak, and not yet having loved, I was overwhelmed by the superabundance of life. I was subject to sudden blushes, and felt as if rivers of molten lava flowed through my heart; I would give out involuntary cries, and night was as troubled by my dreams as my waking. I needed something to fill the abyss of my existence: I descended valleys, climbed mountains, summoning with all the strength of my desire the ideal object of some future affection; I embraced it in the winds; I thought I heard it in the sighing of the waters: all things became that phantom of imagination, both the stars in the sky and the very principle of life in the universe.”

That is a romantic era hero if I have ever seen one.

In Atala, the character, Chactas, falls deeply in love with an Indian woman, Atala, and finds, in her, something in life worth being romantically devoted to. As with all romantic lives it seems, bliss is infected by reason or some form of religion or both. Chactas’ missionary priest tells him that his suffering is part of what it means to be human. “I have never yet met a man who has not been deceived in his dreams of happiness,” he consoles him,

“no heart that does not suffer some hidden wound. The heart that appears calmest resembles the natural wells of the Alachua savannah: the surface appears calm and clear, but when you look into the depths of the basin, you see some monstrous alligator that the well nourishes with its waters.”

Chateaubriand would later retract the philosophy of his youthful romanticism, explaining sardonically in his memoirs, that he would not have written such things if he could go back to his youth.

"If René did not exist, I would not write it again; if it were possible for me to destroy it, I would destroy it. It spawned a whole family of René poets and René prose-mongers; all we hear nowadays are pitiful and disjointed phrases; the only subject is gales and storms, and unknown ills moaned out to the clouds and to the night. There's not a fop who has just left college who hasn't dreamt he was the most unfortunate of men; there's not a milksop who hasn't exhausted all life has to offer by the age of sixteen; who hasn't believed himself tormented by his own genius; who, in the abyss of his thoughts, hasn't given himself over to the "wave of passions"; who hasn't struck his pale and dishevelled brow and astonished mankind with a sorrow whose name neither he, nor it, knows."

The Romantic era painter, Caspar David Frederick put the law of the romantic heart this way: “The artist’s feeling is his law. Genuine feeling can never be contrary to nature; it is always in harmony with her. But another person’s feelings should never be imposed on us as law.” The French painter Eugene Delecroix would have joined Frederick in scolding Chateaubriand for letting age dampen the fire of youthful passions. We are not tradesmen,” wrote Delecroix to a friend in 1820, “We shall not bury our youthful hearts, at twenty-five or thirty, in the depth of a safe.”

Question for Comment: When, if ever, is it appropriate to surrender living out an irrational approach to life to something more planned and predictable?